Incidental memories

Talk of the Quad: Not quite apple pie

Foreignness is strange. Americanness is stranger. It’s subtler, like the feeling of self-consciousness when I order an Americano and feel my place in a heritage of the (however briefly) expatriated longing for a cup of brewed coffee. Perplexed and under caffeinated, I am learning what it is to be foreign and what it is to be American. The Americanness is what surprises me.
I recently boarded a plane and an Irish man engaged me in conversation. He was a Civil War buff who had been to the U.S. several times and had some strong and, truth be told, bizarre opinions. “The United States,” he said, “is not a nation. It is a confederation of states. Ireland is a nation.” I bristled.
While my travel aquaintance’s view of the U.S. seems out of left field even for a non-American, it did give me pause. In Ireland, I am sometimes reminded of my Americanness in tangible ways. My passport is blue and I have to get it stamped in the Non-EU line at the airport. My accent is wider and more nasally. When I’m picking out salad greens, I look for “arugula” instead of “rocket.” When I can’t find it, I get frustrated because the grocery stores here are inefficient and I think I could make them better.
What really catches me off-guard, however, is feeling my Americanness in the abstract and missing my imagined community very strongly. I belong more to Oregon (where I have never visited and may never go) than to Belgium, where I went last week. I feel a connection to Iowans and Hawaiians and Texans that far exceeds only a humanist bond. Alaska is farther away from my state, New Jersey, than New Jersey is from Europe. So why, when I think Alaska, do I still think home?
When I first arrived in Ireland and people asked where I was from, I said, “the U.S.,” or, if I wanted to spend the breath, “the United States.” “Oh, the States!” my interlocutor would say. “The States! I’ve been to Miami and Las Vegas and New York City and LA.” Always (for some reason) these cities. But more notably, always “the States.” As if the plurality was the only essential bit and the “United” superfluous. I now say the “the States,” in conversation, but it always feels awkward in my mouth. Why do I feel that the “United” is essential? Isn’t it?How do I explain that Americanness doesn’t sound like English? That it doesn’t look like a Walmart or J.Crew aisle or smell like an apple pie?
We talk a lot about nationalism—if it is good, if it is bad, if it is real, if it is necessary. Whatever it is, it is on my mind all the time. I feel it nagging at my heels when I cross streets where the cars drive on the opposite side of the road.
Waiting for a walk signal, my Americano in hand, I make my list.
Americanness is uncanny, the foreign always familiar. It isn’t having or not having guns, it’s worrying about them.
Americanness is race with a big question mark and religion with a big ellipsis and work ethic all in quotations.
Americanness is knowing that there are 300 million people and a few islands and an enormous land mass in the Western hemisphere that you are supposed to be allowed to belong to and that are supposed to belong to each other. It is as big as homesickness and as soft as my favorite blanket and as loud as a call with one as the country code.
How is it so big and so little at the same time? When does it fit and when does it feel too large or small? What is it about “we” that is so irresolvable but so strong that it spans oceans and thousands of miles, the magnetic field of us-ness reaching me all the way in Ireland, huddled around my coffee cup, with my me-ness compass’s arrow pointed home?
Katherine Churchill is a member of the Class of 2016.

Talk of the Quad: Stung and restless

As the old saying goes, sometimes you are the scorpion and sometimes you are not. More often, however, you are the 20-year-old ecology student who found the scorpion with your foot.
Ceini—who was rubbing my spasming calf muscle—said, “Well, at least now you have a great story to tell.”
“You can definitely win the Most Badass Bowdoin Abroad Experience Award,” Graham chuckled. “If this doesn’t kill you first.”
We all laughed, though my peers and I were out of our depth in the rural South African bush. Could scorpions kill you? How necessary was a trip to the hospital? With no Internet access, no cell phone service and no car, the decision was made for us. We would stay at the Tshulu camp for the night.
Philly, our South African game guard, squashed the scorpion with his boot. He placed the body in a Sasko bread bag to assess the creature from behind a plastic barricade. The scorpion had a big tail and small pinchers.
“Did you know this area has some of the most poisonous scorpions in the world?” he asked. “But those ones are smaller. You should have really watched where you were stepping.”We later found out the scorpion was actually the most poisonous in southern Africa. The Parabuthus granulatus kills about four to six people in South Africa every year—usually children, but I digress. I received a smaller dose of the toxins, saving me from an expensive helicopter ride to the not-so-nearby hospital. It was an unfortunate circumstance with very fortunate results. For that, I am grateful.
As I sat in bed that night, alternating from one odd position to the next to quell the pain, I began to think about how peculiar the whole situation was. Of course the only serious scorpion sting in my abroad programs’ history occurred at our most isolated travel location. Of course the scorpion was the most poisonous species in the region. And of course I was stung while procrastinating to avoid writing a 20 page literature paper. Karma is cruel.
Though the situation included all of the factors that could go horribly wrong, it did not. I never went to the hospital. Instead, I subsisted on an absurd amount of ibuprofen—a limited and precious resource abroad.
We should have tried to denature the venom with hot packs; we instead tried to numb my hypersensitive nerves with ice. I could have, and probably should have, presented systemic symptoms up to eight hours after the sting. I should have been hospitalized for six days, with a steady stream of nerve block pulsing through my veins. But it wasn’t necessary. In that moment, I was both lucky and cursed.
The burning and stinging sensation travelled up to my knee. I found myself contemplating how I ended up running into a scorpion while wearing shoes and a headlamp. The necessary precautions were not enough to fend off the insidious savannah fauna. So what went wrong?
I replayed the scene in a loop as I paced the floor to increase circulation to my limb. Instead of looking at my feet with the headlamp, I was illuminating the path further ahead. My negligence opened a prime opportunity for the scorpion.
The venom made one notion clear. Looking too far into the future can cripple you in the present; preparation does not imply protection.
As the last of midterms roll through, it is important to remember precautions, like studying, only go so far. I plan to take a pause from work to appreciate the view, the chirping of crickets, sun rays peeking through the clouds, and laughs shared with my professors.
If we can disregard the path ahead and focus on where we are now, we may just avoid the threatening tail of the scorpion at our feet. If the scorpion stings, the toxins may take a few days to process. But I promise, the pain subsides by the time you finish watching “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” for the fourth time. (For clarification purposes, in addition to a shortage of ibuprofen in the African savannah, there are also limited movie options.)
To quote seven-time American Dodgeball Association of America All-Star Patches O’Houlihan, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” Instead, I would recommend skipping the wrenches altogether. Preparation is only effective to a point and obstacles will tackle you regardless. So you may as well stop to smell the pine trees along the way. Just watch your step.
Elana Vlodaver is a member of the Class of 2016.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Colin Swords

Contributor

April 3, 2015

This spring, as I struggle with the idea that my time at Bowdoin will soon end, I have found myself rereading a piece that first appeared on this page last April. It’s one that resonated with me back then but speaks to me in new ways each time I return to it. In two months, in two years, and beyond, I hope I will continue to appreciate its message. I am referring to “Life per second,” by Toph Tucker ’12.

As a quick disclaimer, I cannot claim to really know the author beyond the strange way that any two random Bowdoin students do—well enough perhaps to chat at a party, but not necessarily enough to offer a quick hello in passing. And because his piece deals with life after Bowdoin, I cannot even maintain that I truly understand the depth of what he writes. I still have two months before the reality of post-grad life sets in, and I am keenly aware of the time that remains.

Avid readers of the Bowdoin Orient (of which I am a self-proclaimed number one fan) know the gist of it. But for those of you who have not yet read his piece, Toph beautifully and precisely reflects upon his time at Bowdoin, as well as the year that had elapsed between his 2013 graduation and last April. What he finds, living in the country’s most populated city, is that there is actually far less density of social interaction in the real world than at Bowdoin. It’s an interesting notion and one worth considering, even if it is not yet relevant to my life.

But one line has stood out to me time and time again: “When I arrived at Bowdoin I thought only of work. By the time I left, I thought only of people.”

It’s such a succinct way to sum up the years we spend in Brunswick. And while I lack the wisdom or experience to meaningfully reflect on much else of what he wrote, I look two months ahead to graduation and find that these words already linger with me. I will always prefer to think about the nights spent with my friends doing nothing and everything, than to remember the hours I put into studying for that one exam in that one class. Even today, that all seems so inconsequential.

But I could not say the same about myself four years ago (I’m happy to say I think I’ve grown a lot since then). I cannot speak for the rest of my peers, but I came here, like many newly matriculated college students, with the idea that higher education would serve as a means to a successful future. The idea of really enjoying my four years in Brunswick was, at the time, much more of an afterthought.

Back then, I valued academic success and the possibility of securing a job immediately after graduation over so many other things. Because really, who needs a break between school and work when you get two weeks of vacation and ten sick days per year? Don’t forget about federal holidays—thank God for Columbus Day. Of course, I still value this type of success now, though the feelings have tempered.

A friend described this to me over Spring Break as Bowdoin’s “culture of work and doing prestigious things” (not the catchiest designation, I know). Having arrived at college on the heels of successful high school careers, we can all relate to this idea. For the Class of 2015, each of us represents about twelve other applicants who, for one reason or another, ended up elsewhere, and it’s almost as if we work so hard just to validate that we earned these spots.

Amidst the pressure to become a Sarah and James Bowdoin Scholar, graduate Phi Beta Kappa, and land a respected internship with a full-time offer attached at the end of the summer, we sometimes ignore what else Bowdoin has to offer. We ignore the classes which truly interest us for the sake of the 101 (or, now, 1101) that will preserve our GPAs. In between meetings with the Career Planning Center and the fellowships office and our professors, we forget to “lose [ourselves] in generous enthusiasms,” as the Offer of the College directs. Instead, we lose ourselves to the idea that something better is on the horizon. All we have to do is make it through these four years, and then we’ll coast. This is an idea I have finally begun to question.

I will always be proud of what I’ve accomplished academically here at Bowdoin. But at what cost do I hold that pride? I put off going abroad for the sake of my majors and in the interest of devoting enough time to the junior year internship search. Of course, the new friends I made here (while some of my closest friends studied in Spain, the United Kingdom and Russia) have helped define my Bowdoin experience in a meaningful way. But still, losing myself to a semester abroad would have been a worthwhile experience.

So when the memories of each lecture fade and we lose touch with Bowdoin’s culture of work, what do we want to remember? What will we remember? For me, I hope to push aside any recollection of my first year seminar and to instead think about the hours I spent lying with my friends on the Quad each spring. And when I look back on Tuesday nights, I want to be reminded of drinks at Joshua’s, not problem sets in the library.

It’s a sentiment I am glad to have realized at this point in my college career, but it’s one I wish had meant more to me four years ago, back when Bowdoin was still fresh.

So while I anxiously prepare myself to graduate on May 23, I find myself in the thick of never ending problem sets, papers and exams. But in two months when I walk across the steps of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to shake President Mills’ hand, these obligations will cease to be relevant. In the end, it won’t be my academic successes or failures that measure the four years I spent in Brunswick. Rather, it will be the happy and incidental memories I made during those moments, however fleeting, when work was the last thing on my mind.

Colin Swords is a member of the Class of 2015.

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